Senator Tom Harkin
cmonforton | May 1, 2012Earlier this month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report on the snail's pace of the OSHA process of issuing new rules to protect workers from health and safety hazards on-the-job. One telling table in the document showed the agency issued about 20 new major regulations in each of the previous two decades (i.e., 24 in the 1980's and 23 in the 1990's), but during the 2000's, OSHA only issued 10 final rules. Although some of these regulations only affected a fraction of all U.S. businesses because the hazards are industry-specific (e.g., servicing of rim wheels, grain…
oracknows | March 3, 2009Yesterday, I wrote about Senator Tom Harkin's (D-IA) little woo-fest in the Senate's Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which he called Integrative Care: A Pathway to a Healthier Nation. I and a lot of the rest of the medical blogosphere (such as PalMD, Val Jones, and Tufted Titmouse) shook our heads in disbelief and disgust at Harkin's statement (video here) about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM):
One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has…
oracknows | March 2, 2009The Tufted Titmouse explains in a spot-on parody of Senator Harkin's statement to his Senate panel.
I'm tellin' ya, "integrative" reporting is the wave of the future, just like "integrative" medicine.
oracknows | March 1, 2009Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) owes me a new irony meter.
I'll explain in a minute, but first you have to know why I even give a rodent's posterior about Harkin. As you may recall, no single legislator in the U.S. has done more to damage the cause of science- and evidence-based medicine than Tom Harkin. It was through his efforts that the National Institutes of Health, despite the fact that its scientists were not agitating for it, had the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) rammed down its throat, first as the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) and then, when…